Yet the ability to mass-process information is not indicative of imagination. Even if lexes are computer generated, they can only be supplementary to creative thought. Wordsmith can produce statistically correct, data-heavy articles, but its prose is not inspired

While it is a popular assumption that millennials have
developed an over-inflated sense of ego thanks to their digital technologies, today’s brand of narcissism is radically different and detached from that of the 1980s yuppie narcissism familiar in books such as Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and films such as Wall Street, which turned 30 in December.

An increase in leisure time – once a central goal of the labour movement – is sorely needed in western societies. In Australia, working hours for full-time employees increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and have only declined slightly since, despite significant increases in productivity. To add insult to injury, workers’ real wages in Australia are no longer rising in line with increased output.

‘We applaud the Sri Lankan Government’s devotion to human rights and their devotion to democratic pluralism,’ Abbott said flatly, after touching down in Sri Lanka. Just days before, the BBC had released the culmination of four years of research: an hour-long report on the human rights nightmare that was the final push of the Sri Lankan Civil War. As a result, even close allies felt compelled to condemn Sri Lanka’s human rights record. That is, except for us.

An increasingly common experience is the ‘phantom lecture’. This is when surplus students can’t fit into the main lecture theatre and are told to go to a second theatre where they’ll find the main lecture streamed onto a screen. Except, that is, in the first week of this semester, when the university forgot to hire someone to set up the stream in the second lecture theatres and students were left staring at a blank screen.